Cubicle curtains are commonly used in medical facilities such as hospitals as visual barriers to provide privacy for patients. For example, semi-private hospital rooms are often divided up into multiple patient spaces using curtains. Therefore, the curtains used in medical facilities are usually suspended from the ceiling on roller tracks to allow quick and easy positioning for access. Suspended curtains are commonly hooked to carriers or rolling carrier cars positioned on ceiling mounted tracks. Using this type of installation, the curtains can be quickly and easily swept aside or repositioned without the use of draw strings.
Suspended ceiling curtains are used in all areas of hospitals including hospital bedrooms, wards, operating rooms and emergency rooms. A problem arises, however, when ceiling height is not uniform from room to room or in a given room. When the ceiling height varies, so must the length of the hanging curtain. Otherwise, in rooms having non-uniform ceiling height, curtains will hang unevenly. As a result, several curtains of different height may have to be used together to effectively partition a particular space. Two alternative methods are available for solving the problems associated with suspending curtains from non-uniform height ceilings.
One alternative would be to have custom curtains fabricated for the particular space to be partitioned given the ceiling height characteristics. This alternative is unattractive for two reasons. First, the cost of custom curtains is often prohibitive. Second, once fabricated, the custom curtain would only be suitable for the particular location it was designed for.
A remaining alternative is to use so-called "curtain drops."
Curtain drops in the prior art are known. Typically, they have been provided in standard dimensions--usually 16 or 18 inches of length. These drops depend from the suspending car and track at the upper end to the point of attachment to the curtain panels at the lower end.
Unfortunately, suspending curtains by drops from ceiling tracks is often complicated by jams and entanglements of the curtains as the curtains are pulled around in their particular track. Typical ceiling mounted tracks are I-beam or "U"-shaped, with the opening in the "U" being exposed downwardly toward the curtain suspended below. Carriers are then positioned inside the ceiling track. Usually, the tracks employed are not straight. Rather, the tracks have curved sections which allow the curtains to be pulled around corners.
It is when the curtains are pulled that jamming of the curtain supporting carriers frequently occurs. As the suspended curtain is pulled, the carriers above lag and/or lead the motion of the curtain below in varying amounts. This causes the carriers to bind amongst themselves.
This binding is particularly aggravated at the corners of the track--where the track curves--usually around the corner of a dimension of a bedding space or other area curtained for privacy within a hospital.
As a partial solution to binding, carrier have in the past been chained one to another. Typically, the incremental length of this chaining together has the same side-to-side spacing at the supporting cars as the below side-to-side spacing between the supporting grommets in the curtain. This solution allows the carriers to follow one another in the expanded overhead disposition just as the curtain is pulled below the curtain drops in an expanded underlying disposition.